


Adaptability

by SimplexityJane



Category: RWBY
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:57:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2115924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Weiss was four, she drew up a Plan For Her Life. </p>
<p>Needless to say, her life disagreed with her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adaptability

**Author's Note:**

> Otherwise known as that time I looked up monkey habits because I wanted to write Sun better, and I left with visions of him braiding everyone's hair. Which led to Weiss, somehow. 
> 
> In this fic Scarlet is nonbinary because I say so.

Once upon a time, Weiss had a Plan For Her Life. The Plan involved becoming a Huntress and defending her family, and maybe having a child or two, though she couldn’t _imagine_ whom she would choose to create _life_ with (and all the sticky bits, things she didn’t really _think_ about, honestly). She would happily hand over her stock to Winter when her father retired or died, obviously, and the Schnee family would be beloved everywhere.

Obviously the Plan had to be revised, what with Vale being on the tipping point of a war with the other kingdoms and Cinder Fall orchestrating the whole thing. Weiss made the Plan when she was four; she didn’t know who Cinder was at the time. No one did.

So Weiss accounted for that. No one knew that she had a Plan, obviously (actually, considering her team and JNPR and their complete inability to keep a secret, everyone probably knew she had a Plan, but she Wasn’t Thinking About That), but she did. It included strategies for any number of devastating or strange scenarios.

Except this one.

“Did you braid my hair while I was reading?” she asked Sun, who had his nose buried in one of Jaune’s or Pyrrha’s comic books. His cheeks were red and he nodded without looking up. Weiss pressed the palm of her hand to the back of her head, noting how the braid fell differently than her normal hairdo, would stay out of her eyes better—she’d been complaining during the strategy meeting about that. Her scar changed her vision already; it wasn’t like she could afford any other distractions.

“You were asleep, actually,” he mumbled, and Weiss felt her face heat up.

She scowled and stomped out of the room.

She’d noticed Sun’s little… grooming habits. They all had. He would twist his fingers in Blake’s hair and scratch her head until she purred and curled into Yang and—but they never saw the end of _those_ grooming sessions. He gave Ruby and Neptune neck and head massages, even rubbed Pyrrha’s feet once before Jaune _actually growled_ at him. He was a perfectly reasonable person until someone got within touching distance, and then it was like his hands could not stay still.

He’d explained it, sort of. All Weiss remembered from that particular conversation was that it had to do with him being a faunus, and since he’d promised never to do that to _her_ she’d filed it away as unimportant.

Now that he _had_ begun to include her in his compulsive faunus habits (likely driven by the grooming rituals among primates, at least according to what she read), she couldn’t help but notice that his hands were very warm. Callused, of course, like everyone’s were, and sometimes rougher than he needed to be, but… warm. Kind, perhaps.

“I’m glad you and Sun got over your ‘sheer and utter hatred’,” Yang said one night, eating an MRE and making a nasty face at it. Weiss missed real food—they all did. When Weiss huffed she grinned. “Blake, not me. Anyway, I’m just saying holidays would have gotten really awkward otherwise, since you’re gonna be at all of them and he’s going to be there for however long he wants to be.”

“I was not _that_ bad. At most it was simply severe dislike and mutual mistrust. Most of it on his end, might I add.” Justified, perhaps, but times were changing, and Winter would be a better leader, or at least more ethical than their father. “He _did_ climb up to our dorm room far too many times while we were at school.”

Yang smiled, obviously remembering _those_ times a bit more fondly than Weiss did. Her penchant for exhibitionism had been most of Weiss’s sex education, after all.

There were some things that could never be unseen.

The war went on, gunfire and swords clashing, faunus and human against faunus and human—and it made her weep sometimes, because no one else would. Not Blake, and certainly not Adam’s version of the White Fang. They hardened themselves, but Weiss had been born cold, and she knew that it couldn’t last. It was better to get it over with.

One battle, close to the end of the war—they had gained ground, and soldiers, and their spies were returning favorable reports—was harder than the others. No one on Velvet’s team came back except the woman herself, and she was in critical condition. Team RWBY suffered too, with both Blake and Yang in the infirmary and Ruby yelling obscenities at Ironwood and Ozpin. Sun refused to leave his tent even though Yang was asking for him, and Weiss finally got fed up with him and just burst in.

“Neptune, Scarlet, Sage, leave _now_ ,” she said, and they promptly vanished. Sun, with his arm thrown across his face, looked _horrific_. Weiss proceeded to tell him this while uncovering his hairbrush, which she then dragged through the _nest_ of hair that somehow formed whenever he ignored it for more than an hour.

“What the _fuck_ , Weiss?” Sun asked, and Weiss held him down with a glyph and a glare. He blinked at her and went boneless. She brushed his hair, wiped his face clean of dirt, and shoved her fingers in the mess that was gelled hair after a good brushing.

“Such an _idiot_ , why do I even bother, be glad they love you or I’d rip you apart with these.” She indicated the glyph. “Now, go sit with them and don’t you dare _ever_ do this again, understand?”

He nodded dumbly, standing up and letting his hands hover above his hair. He opened his mouth to thank her, or perhaps to ask why she’d made him presentable. She glared him down until he’d left.

“You know, I don’t think anyone else gets to boss him around like that,” Scarlet said, sitting down. Their arms slung around her and Weiss leaned back, grinning at Neptune as he sat down next to the two of them. Weiss was still sort of iffy about the sticky bits, and the _romance_ bits made her cringe a little, but she liked having friends like this. Sage was good to talk to about it, and Scarlet knew all about being somewhere in the middle, and Neptune—well, Neptune was alright. She liked him.

“Ruby’s still yelling at Ironwood. It’s beautiful,” Sage said, closing the tent flap. Weiss reviewed her life—a soldier, a Huntress, with a team of mostly competent friends beside her who were still alive, at least. She wasn’t married and probably wouldn’t be, and they didn’t know it yet but Blake’s, Yang’s, and Sun’s children were going to end up taught how to act _properly_ by her and her alone. After the war was over she was going to stop fighting for a few years to help rebuild, and she couldn’t give up on the company _now_.

Weiss’s plan had certainly _shifted_. Then again, adaptability was the mark of a true Huntress.

 


End file.
